Dealing with Social Anxiety

Dealing with social anxiety

For many of us our days are full of stresses from every corner. Just getting up and going to work or school is a major effort of our willpower. Outside our front door is where the confrontation begins between our will to go out into the world and find our place, and our fear of social disaster if we try. Dealing with social anxiety is an everyday struggle for us. We may live continuously with a battle in some area that leaves us emotionally exhausted and feeling overwhelmed at the end of the day. Our self-esteem may falter as we feel we are the only ones in the world afraid of our shadow, or so it would seem. All that defeat, is about to change forever! Now, it is our time to reclaim our empowered life, which we always wanted.

Thanks for joining us and welcome to our website. We are glad you are here. If you suffer from fear and anxiety in coping with the stresses of life, you have our respect and our love. In dealing with social anxiety, the first thing we want you to know right from the beginning is that you are a very strong and wonderful person, just as you are. Yes, just as you are, not as others want you to be, or as you think you need to be, but just as you are right now. You have faced a lot of fearful settings in the days past and you have faced them with strength and resolve. Here is where the tides will turn and the tables will change. Dealing with social anxiety before meant surviving the day without a cave-in of some sort, now we will deal with social anxiety by getting rid of it.

Before, your life was lived in the day of the stressor, when the denizens in the environment were king, but not any more! Here we are going to deal with social anxiety that has kept you in hiding for so long. Your stressors are no longer the powers that be and you are not a little mammal hiding in the grass to survive. You are no longer going to need to be unnecessarily dealing with social anxiety. We are going to show you sides of you that you did not know existed, until now. We will do a little history first to show you how normal and mentally healthy you actually are. Trust us, you will be fine once you understand the beauty and the wonder within your self, that beauty that was always there! God wants to show you, outside of any religion, through dealing with social anxiety, that you are far greater than anything for which you could be afraid.

Let us go back into the dawn of time and begin at the beginning. Dealing with social anxiety actually started, by God's intention, when all was when God was first creating all things. In that womb of existence known as the Garden of Eden, God returned one day to see his handiwork. Adam and Eve responded to God’s calling with replies of “We ran and hid because we were afraid and ashamed, for we are naked.” God, expecting this, asked, “Who told you that you were naked?” This was the first evidence of the conflict between our deified selves, and our misunderstanding of our deified selves.

Lack of understanding of our beauty is the cause of all social anxiety and social fears. The template for shame is the belief that we are inadequate. We believe that we are inadequate because we do not know what we truly are inside. We must have a basis for our fear, because we did not come into this world with a natural concept of self-inferiority: someone or something, a Satan role player, had to tell us we are ‘naked,’ or inferior. That is where the lie started and our false beliefs began to instill fears in us. Ever since that early life experience we have been dealing with social anxiety, when in fact there is no inferiority whatsoever. In dealing with social anxiety, begin by memorizing this template for all of your stresses and fears. If you can memorize this, you can then fill in the blanks for what the lies are; who or what told those lies to you, and what parts you feel are naked and missing.

The Lies others told us creates our Shame, which creates Insecurity, and that insecurity creates all of our Social Fears. We are afraid of a shadow.

What are the Lies? Who are the others who told us those lies? Moreover, what about me is inferior and will not be loved and welcomed by others? Such introspection needs to happen to get to the foundation of why one would be anxious at such things as entering a church building before a service, for example. Dealing with social anxiety means first dealing with the assumptions you hold about yourself socially.

Look out for comparables such as ‘too awkward,’ ‘not beautiful enough,’ ‘too old,’ ‘too small,’ ‘not educated enough,’ ‘not handsome enough,’ ‘not a public speaker,’ ‘do not command enough respect,’ ‘not a leader,’ ‘not tall enough,’ “too fat,’ etc. If you find yourself using terms like these to describe the basis for your social anxiety, this indicates you are comparing yourself to others, or to some standard, as a way to assess personal value of whom and what you are. That is a definite error, a no-no, and is very emotionally poisoning. Those kinds of terms are misleading as a means of self-evaluation because it assumes you need to possess the same characteristics as another at something that is not ‘you’.

What do we mean by that? Let us use an example. For most of us, we equate going into the social arena with some kind of value exchange. If we feel we have a lot of ‘social money,’ as in the case of feeling poised and charismatic, then we feel we are worthy of being in the social spotlight. If we have no ‘social money,’ in our own eyes, we feel unworthy to venture into the social arena. We feel out of place and undeserving to be there.

The ingredients to a lie

Dealing with social anxiety must begin with understanding our personal past. You did not come here seeing you were naked; someone or something had to tell you that you were naked. Someone or something had to show you that you were missing some of the things you would need to bring your joy into this world. Everyone has a particular joy that they are supposed to bring into this world, and so do you! Someone or something, a parent, guardian, or the lack of one, bore the message to you that you were not good enough, pretty enough or talented enough for others to enjoy being with or wish to have in their lives. That is a very painful incorrect lesson to learn!

We all have a joy to bring, and as such, we need to feel our joy is beautiful enough to bring benefit to others. Since we come from God, we are God, and we want to be a blessing to others. We also want love and acceptance from others. That is normal spirituality and is as it should be. However, our original source figures, our parents, do not always have the zeal and the enthusiasm over life that we do, and sometimes our zeal over things angers them. They do not respond with encouragement, but with indifference and even with abuse. When we experience this kind of a response from our caregivers, we wrongly associate our zeal, our enthusiasm with being a liability and a drawback. We incorrectly learn that the things that interested us early on are unimportant. We also learned that life was no longer about sharing our joy with others, and giving it away, it is about not making mistakes and embarrassing ourselves. The best way not to offend is not to share, and the best way not to embarrass ourselves is to hide. The best way not to face rejection is to hide our needful side from others.

However to interact with life socially which we have to do all the time, we have to share, and that is where the dealing with social anxiety comes in. We need to interrupt our bosses at work and share information; we need to talk with schoolmates and speak with them, and we need approach people we want to meet at our church in hopes of establishing a loving relationship. We need to go into fancy restaurants and hold cups of coffee and eat with the right forks, and we need to reprimand aggressive employees. We also need to answer the phones at work in front of our bosses and speak to customers politely. All of these are potentially hazardous if we equate current settings with being like settings from our childhood. If we too strongly associate failure with these experiences instead of success, we must deal with the social anxiety that threat poses.

Dealing with Social Anxiety, and the intentionally deceiving experience

Life told us a lie that we are unable to accomplish those tasks similar to those we just mentioned. Life also told us a lie that because of that inability, we are a disappointment to others. Somewhere in your past, your deep past perhaps, a parent, or a social experience told you that you were not beautiful and that you are a disappointment somehow. That experience told you by deduction that you do not measure up or compare to others of your peer group. You needed others to rejoice in your presence and be enthusiastic about you, as you were about them. They were not. Perhaps there was no parent there, or your parent was harsh, unsympathetic, or you had hostile peers. Perhaps they did not give you the joyous attention that you needed. Somehow, you learned the lie that the things inside you are not beautiful and worthy of recognition, and would not be welcomed by others. We learned the lie that we are a disappointment to our Caregivers, and we failed our Source Nurturers in some horrific way. If we failed them, we must surely be a failure to all others and to all life as well. Dealing with social anxiety now becomes a reality as we navigate our way through the icy waters of school and friendships in avoidance of failure and pain.

However, our social world map we use to navigate as adults leaves some very important things out, as we shall soon see! To begin with, childhood experiences do not always represent the true sides of ourselves that others see and admire in us today; in fact, they can show us just the opposite of our real self. Why is this so? Oftentimes our first social experiences are only going to be as relevant to our true talents and skills as what our parents saw in us. Let us assume your parents were sports fans, and you were not, and your first bad social experience was playing in little league for example. They made you play because it was good for building your character, supposedly. However, you not being athletically inclined had a bad day and lost the game because of lack of skill. You then feel you let your parents down, because you failed to live up to what they needed you to be, and what you should have been, for them.

This tragic event does represent your true self, but not the side that everyone saw. What really happened was that you tried to please your parents by trying hard for them by doing something that you were not cut out to do. That is the badge of a loving devoted child with his or her priorities right for becoming a top-flight citizen. You were worshipful of others and rules of society, wanting to contribute and participate, which are excellent qualities of character. That is what the experience should have shown you. Nevertheless, because of the expectations of your parents, you saw the exact opposite in yourself! You saw that you were inadequate and a failure, because of physical attributes only, and that based mostly on unfamiliarity and inexperience! You concluded incorrectly that what life expects of you is not inside of you to produce.

That is the beginning of your flawed template of what defines you. You learned that the bar for what life expects is too high to jump over, and every social encounter is a great risk of knocking that bar over. Dealing with social anxiety just became your new life goal, instead of living in your joy. Dealing with social anxiety comes from seeing yourself through the eyes of your disappointed parents because you could not live up to their expectations. What that ‘bad’ experience should have taught you about yourself is that you were not afraid to try hard to please your superiors and do your best under any circumstances, even doing things out of your element and not complaining about it. Those are marks of great virtue, not indications of inferiority. We developed unnecessary concerns about our loveliness, from these misleading experiences. Dealing with social anxiety became a necessary life skill as we discovered we needed to hide to survive.

Now for some answers

We will use an example here to best illustrate the true relationship between your original beautiful self and your world around you, yes, your world that is anxiously waiting to meet you, in all your poise and glory, free of any social anxiety of any kind. Pretend you are in an airplane and you wish to take off on your long trip to your wonderful destination. You are the true you, inside your airplane. The airplane is the mechanism of you life as you live it today. The social anxiety that is causing you so much emotional trouble is all the fuel in the wing tanks. It does not matter what the fear is. You can be afraid of rejection if you speak out in class in school, or you are afraid of not being in proper dress for a social event, or do not like walking in front of a crowd because you are afraid of others making fun of how you walk, as I was for my youthful years in public.

The actual feared event does not matter, the fact you fear any event that restrains your social activity to carry out your life is what matters. Any events you fear all damage your life in some capacity because it keeps you from living your life unreservedly. That is the fuel in the wing tanks. However, your fear of rejection or embarrassment to yourself has pumped all your fuel into the left side wing and the wing sags dangerously, since the right side wing tanks are empty. In this condition, your plane cannot take off and you just sit on the runway, unable to fly. The landing gear of isolation and withdrawing from certain social activity, perhaps the social activity you would love to feel comfortable doing otherwise, is all you have for support. The Dilemma is your life is inoperable since planes love to fly and they do not want to taxi on the ground everywhere they go. Your social fears make you have to be dealing with social anxiety instead of doing the business of living out your life the way you want to. What do we do now?

Fear of failure, rejection, unexpected embarrassment, uncontrollable social panic, or something else is what is keeping all the fuel in the left wing and making the plane of your life not airworthy. The right wing tank is very empty so it cannot counter weigh the left wing tank. What should the right wing tank have in it, which it does not have in it now? Visions of success and achievement, acceptance, lack of embarrassment, lack of uncontrollable panic, and other positive visions. These positive scenarios will need to offset the failed scenarios that you are presently envisioning as unavoidable.

Dealing with social anxiety begins with associating a fearful event with a possible positive outcome as well as the possible negative outcome that you fear. You must see yourself doing something successfully each time you see yourself failing. Remember, the failure is not guaranteed, like the law of gravity, it is only a probability, and statistically a small one at that! Begin filling your right wing tank with all the positive scenarios you can imagine for every scenario you are afraid of, and which is causing you to be dealing with social anxiety. Every failure scenario must have a matching positive success scenario to level it out and be even. When your mind becomes accustomed to thinking about success in a certain setting or event, the same time it used to see failure and embarrassment only, the fuel will begin to transfer from the left wing fuel tank over to the right one, leveling out the plane of your life. If you feel you do not deserve a good life because you are unworthy and have self-esteem issues, we will work on that later as well. Stay with us, for we will not leave you without finishing the work we start!

Okay, we have told you how to start to change things inside your own mind, and now we will tell you what this does to your airplane! What we think inside our minds does more than change our thinking patterns to make us more poised socially. The wonderful news is that our minds are connected to our hearts, and it is our hearts, not our minds that actually controls our airplane and our destiny! Our hearts are our radio antennae and broadcast on the psychic radio to the entire universe to bring to us that which we believe exists.

Every time you imagine a positive scenario to counter the negative scenario you fear, in dealing with social anxiety, you tell yourself you deserve better. More than that, you actually transmit with your heart out on the spiritual radio to all other souls on your level to come into your life and to give you that better setting you believe you deserve. When you fear an embarrassing or terrifying social event, you psychically attract that event, and the hostile personalities to you to carry out your feared outcome. If you fear others, you attract fearful and poisoning others to your world to threaten you. That is why the more you fear something, the more probability there is that it will happen.

Dealing with social anxiety the best way is to imagine positive outcomes in the settings you fear, and then trust life to send those positive outcomes to you. If you see the possibility that something good can happen to you in a social setting, then that ‘seeing’ will bring it into being. This happens through both psychological and psychic mechanisms simultaneously. You will not always fail at every thing you fear will happen, and not all observers of you will be hostile and laugh at you.

If you trust life, your heart will broadcast to all nurturing souls in your vicinity to come into your circle of friends and bless you. Your heart will always broadcast whatever message your mind thinks. Remember there are nurturing others that need and want you as much as you need and want them. Others with similar interests and backgrounds are out there, and welcome you into their worlds, if they were to meet you. In addition, do you know what you all will be doing? You and your loved ones will be doing the very things for enjoyment and relaxation that you are afraid of doing socially right now.

In dealing with social anxiety, let us review: We learned we create our life around us with two tools, not just one tool. Of these tools, one is psychological, and the other is psychic. The psychological tool is our mind, which causes us to fail at the things we fear because we set ourselves up for it. The other tool is psychic and is our heart, which communicates to others and to life to send us the settings complete with the hostile personalities to carry out our fears. If we fill our left wing tank of our life’s airplane with fear and negativity, we must remain imprisoned on the ground, too imbalanced to take off with our life where our heart wants to go.

If we imagine a positive ending to every setting we fear, it will fill up the right wing tanks with fuel as we tell ourselves we can possibly succeed just as easily as we can possibly fail. More than that, our hearts will begin attracting as many positive settings of social success and nurturers into our lives as it has attracted failure settings previously. Once our minds have gained the habit of imagining a successful attempt at a social risk as much as it has imagined a failed attempt, the airplane of our life will balance out in weight. At some point, the opportunity on the right for success if we try, will balance out the fear factor on the left if we fail. Soon we will be chomping at the bit to try what we have been afraid of for so long. Our natural confidence will encourage us to push back the barriers of our lives, and soon the airplane of our life will be climbing skyward!

Remember the basics in dealing with social anxiety

Go back, look at the original failures of your past, and question their validity. Are you really as inferior and incapable of doing something as that original experience indicated to you? Think very carefully about it for a long time. We believe you will begin to pick holes in the logic that went into your conclusion about yourself originally.

For every feared social risk, and imagined failure, imagine an equally opposite success to balance it out. If the fear is of failure to perform, imagine a success happening and a roar of applause. If the fear is of rejection, then imagine a warm welcome and an excited acceptance, in the case of seeking companionship. Do not stop imagining scenarios until you have a success image for every imagined failure image in your mental inventory. This will take discipline and effort on your part.

There is more in depth on this subject of dealing with social anxiety in our book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/Tools of your Mind. For help with any emotional abuse, self-esteem and emotional healing issues, please consider this book as the definitive answer to your or your loved ones difficulties as we find the treatment for Social Anxiety that works for us. In our book, we talk about the whole overview of our soul’s journey as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We talk about the importance of getting our emotional needs met, as we grow older in our changing world. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch. This is the ultimate book for your type of situation.

Thank you for visiting us today and please keep in touch, sharing your trials and victories with us. We promise to answer personally every Email that we receive.

Shayne and Lori North

Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book

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